The World Wide Web of the Internet is the most successful distributed application in the history of computing. In the Web environment, client machines effect transactions to Web servers use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is a known application protocol providing users access to files (e.g., text, graphics, images, sound, video, etc.) using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify "links" to other servers and files. In the Internet paradigm, a network path to a server is identified by a so-called Uniform Resource Locator (URL) having a special syntax for defining a network connection. Use of an HTML-compatible browser (e.g., Netscape Navigator) at a client machine involves specification of a link via the URL. In response, the client makes a request to the server identified in the link and receives in return a document formatted according to HTML.
The Web server is usually a standalone file server that services various Web document requests. Because the server is self-contained, web site administration is cumbersome because access control must be individualized for each device.
Moreover, private and public enterprises are now setting up so-called "Intranets" within their organizations to allow employees and customers to access data on their own corporate Web sites. Such organizations use multiple computers interconnected into a distributed computing environment in which users access distributed resources and process applications. A known distributed computing environment, called DCE, has been implemented using software available from the Open Systems Foundation (OSF). As DCE environments become the enterprise solution of choice, many applications may be utilized to provide distributed services such as data sharing, printing services and database access. OSF DCE includes a distributed file system, called Distributed File Services (DFS), for use in these environments.
DFS provides many advantages over a standalone file server, such as higher availability of data and resources, the ability to share information throughout a very large-scale system, and protection of information by the robust DCE security mechanism. In particular, DFS makes files highly available through replication, making it possible to access a copy of a file if one of the machines where the file is located goes down. DFS also brings together all of the files stored in various file systems in a global namespace.
Multiple servers can export their file system to this namespace. All DFS users, in the meantime, share this namespace, making all DFS files readily available from any DFS client machine.
It would be highly desirable to extend the functionality of existing standalone Web servers in the enterprise environment to take advantage of the scalability, file availability and security features of DFS (or other similar distributed file systems). As a by-product, users with an off-the-shelf browser would be able to easily access the Web information stored in the DFS namespace with no additional software on the client machine.